Nokia: Open source developers should play by our rules

I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the open source developer community that needs to adapt to the ways of commercial software vendors, not the other way around. "We want to educate open source developers. There are

I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the open source developer community that needs to adapt to the ways of commercial software vendors, not the other way around.

"We want to educate open source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks, and subsidized business models," Jaaski told attendees of the Handsets World conference in Berlin. In other words, the open source community needs to learn how to keep things closed.

Nokia has been involved with open source for several years. Notably, it used Linux and several open source code libraries as the foundation of Maemo, the operating system for its line of Internet tablet devices. To be fair, Nokia has also contributed to a number of open source projects in return. But if Jaaski thinks that gives Nokia a right to dictate terms -- sorry, to "educate developers" -- I think he's in for a rude awakening.

Not everything needs to be open, and there's certainly still room for proprietary software in the world. But when it comes to development platforms, the competition is increasingly stiff. As John De Goes, president of tools vendor N-Brain, told Javalobby just last week, "The only commercial development tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools."

The most obvious example of a developer platform that leapfrogs the competition is Microsoft Visual Studio. Developers who code for non-Windows operating systems may scoff, but no one who has actually used Visual Studio can deny that it's a top-notch IDE. Moreover, Microsoft is the ultimate authority on the Win32 and .Net APIs, and even the languages, including Visual Basic and C#, are largely Microsoft inventions. How can open source tools compete with that level of vertical integration?